Correctional facilities have traditionally recorded telephone conversations of its inmates. Such recordings may be conducted pursuant to a variety of rules that range anywhere from only recording conversations of calls made to specific telephone numbers, calls made by specific inmates or made using specific telephones, to recording every single call. Various techniques for recording telephone calls are known. Examples of known recording techniques include those described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,647,096 titled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR REMOTELY CONTROLLING AUTOMATED CALL PLACEMENT CALL MONITORING FUNCTIONS,” U.S. Pat. No. 6,665,376 titled “SELECTIVELY ACTIVATED INTEGRATED REAL-TIME RECORDING OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONS WITH AUTOMATED DOCUMENTATION OF CONSENT TO CALL RECORDING,” and those described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,058,163, entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR EX POST FACTO PRESERVING A RECORDED CONVERSATION”, the disclosures of which are hereby incorporated herein by reference.
Some audio recordings are made on wire susceptible to magnetization or on magnetic tape. Audio recordings are also made by passing the audio through an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and by storing digital data in a digital storage medium such as a magnetic hard disk, a semiconductor memory, or optical or magneto-optical storage such as a writable CD-ROM. Further, in certain instances, the audio is communicated in digital form over a communication network (e.g., as with Voice over IP (VOIP)), wherein the digital audio may be captured and stored to a digital storage medium.
Thus, recording of inmate telephone calls is well known. Such recordings may be monitored by appropriate authorities to detect information regarding the security of facilities, continuing or past criminal activity, etc. Monitoring of the recordings may be performed manually (e.g., by a person listening to the recording) and/or may be performed robotically (or autonomously) by, for example, computer processing logic for analyzing the recordings for certain keywords, etc. In some instances, the recordings may be stored for later use, such as for later investigations, later used as evidence in a court of law, etc.
As the number of recordings increases, difficulty arises in managing such recordings. Various management issues are present. One management issue is deciding how best to store the recordings (e.g., whether to store in on-line storage or store to off-line storage). Generally, in a multi-stage storage system, various stages of storage are available, such as immediate (or temporary) storage which is typically used as the recording is being captured, online storage, near-line storage, and offline storage, as examples. These various stages of storage are well known in the art and are thus not described in detail herein so as not to unnecessarily obscure details of the inventive concepts presented herein. It should be recognized that generally each of these stages of storage successively take longer to retrieve data therefrom, but are each successively less expensive. For instance, a recording can be retrieved much more quickly from online storage than from offline storage, but generally online storage is more expensive than offline storage. Accordingly, a desire arises to manage to which type of storage a recording should be stored and for how long. Thus, when managing storage of captured recordings, a determination is to be made regarding where and for how long to store recordings.
Another management issue that arises is deciding whether to process a given recording, such as by having a user listen manually to the recording and/or have the recording processed by a keyword detection application. Such processing is typically referred to as “post-processing” of the recording because the processing is generally performed after the recording of the call is captured. While certain processing may be performed live during a call (e.g., eavesdropping on live communication), often the calls are recorded for later processing. Of course, certain processing may occur on captured portions of a recorded call while the call is going on, and thus processing of a recording need not be delayed until after a call is fully completed (although, very often due in part to the volume of calls and limited processing resources available, the calls are fully completed and recordings are stored for some period of time before processing). A related management issue involves prioritizing the recordings that are to be processed to, for instance, determine the order in which the recordings are to be processed. As the number of recordings increase, it becomes desirable to manage the post-processing of such recordings to ensure proper utilization of the limited processing resources that are available. Thus, it becomes desirable to determine which recordings to perform post-processing on, what type of post-processing to perform on a given recording, and the relative priority of the desired post-processing of the captured recordings.
As mentioned above, correctional facilities (local, state and federal) have traditionally recorded telephone conversations for investigations with a variety of rules that range anywhere from only recording specific numbers, inmates or phones up to recording every single call including visitation. A variety of factors have resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of recorded calls, including the recording technology becoming more ubiquitous, the cost for storage steadily declining, and the Department of Homeland Security requiring more recording. Thus, an increasing number of recordings are required to be managed. A significant number of recordings are not reviewed until some point in the future when an event happens that causes a review, and as a result there are requirements to store the recordings that range from, say, 90 days to 5 years. This increased usage and longevity has, in part, resulted in a desire to both (a) filter recordings that may be more urgent to review (i.e., better prioritize recordings that should receive more urgent attention), and (b) better manage how recordings are stored for immediate or delayed retrieval.